Opioid therapies and treatments, and opiate-based analgesics, have become a critical component in treatment and management of pain in the clinical setting. Associated with those therapies is the well-recognized opioid addiction, which has drawn a great deal of attention and focus. However, what has drawn less attention is the difficulty that even the non-addicted population has when withdrawing from standard accepted patterns of prescribing narcotic pain relieving medications. Experience has shown that a patient recovering from surgery with a take-home opiate prescription will experience physical discomfort complicated by the short term use of pain relievers which contain narcotics. The same is also observed in the office-based use of narcotics for as little as a week. Physicians are well aware of the risks of increasing discomfort when a short term pain prescription ends, and both patient and physician realize that stopping the narcotic is in the best interest of all. However, accomplishing this transition is often difficult, uncomfortable and time-consuming. A gradual decrease in dosage of the narcotic is an accepted solution, however achieving the correct balance of quantity, strength and timing is often outside the realm of patient responsibility.
What is needed, therefore, is a method of ameliorating or preventing a patient's symptoms related to termination of opioid pain therapy, and compositions for achieving said method. The method and compositions should take advantage of knowledge of managing opioid pain therapy termination, yet improve such methods and compositions by providing a series of self tapering dosages of a pharmaceutical composition that is configured to alleviate or prevent symptoms of the patient's termination of opioid pain therapy. It is to such a method and composition that embodiments of the present disclosure are primarily directed.